Attention Span – Tom Orange

Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand | Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry & Public Space | Palm Press | 2008

The smartest demonstration and open invitation I’ve seen of what a poetics off the page and engaged with the world does, can and might look like.

Benjamin Friedlander | The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes | Subpress | 2007
Laura Moriarty | A Semblance: Selected Poems: 1975-2006 | Omnidawn | 2007

Overviews from two of our most important poets at mid-career, presenting new opportunities to see where they’ve come from and where they’ve now brought us.

David Harvey | A Brief History of Neoliberalism | Oxford University Press | 2007
Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism | Picador | 2008

Particularly instructive when read together.

Maggie Nelson | Women, The New York School and Other True Abstractions | University of Iowa Press | 2007

It’s about time someone like Nelson has come along to explode the conventional wisdom on these matters! Her refusal to accept the terms of debate on their own terms is utterly refreshing.

Michael Pollan | The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World | Random | 2002
Michael Pollan | The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals | Penguin | 2007

“Everything’s connected” goes the ecological credo, but Pollan’s exemplary studies show that credo operating with new subtleties and depth, a true parti pris des choses that is at once a profoundly important politics and ethics as well as ecology.

Rod Smith | Deed | University of Iowa Press | 2007

What the small press poetry world has known for years now finally garners national attention: this is a poetry to be reckoned with.

Charles Gayle (alto sax), Sirone (bass) & Rashied Ali (drums) | Stadtsaal, Burghausen (Germany) | 8 March 2008 | audience recording circulated via dimeadozen.org

With this formidable rhythm section behind him, Gayle trades in his trademark scorched-earth tenor saxophone for a lighter and sweeter horn. Be assured, his alto tone is still incredibly biting and intense, but it’s somehow more soulful, warmer, more human. He has blended the blusey wail of Ornette Coleman, the flurrious attack of John Coltrane and the ecstatic leaps of Albert Ayler with his own genius to become a true master of the idiom.

Harmony Korine | Mister Lonely | IFC Films | 2008

An expatriate Michael Jackson impersonator alone in Paris finds the company of kindred spirits when he is invited by a Marilyn Monroe to join a commune of other impersonators in the Scottish highlands. The trailer for this film made it look overly sentimental and sappy  — in stark contrast to the shock tactics of Korine’s previous efforts (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy). To my surprise, however, and with the addition of flying nuns under guidance by Werner Herzog in cameo, Korine has put together a truly touching mediation on freedom, marginalization and utopia, and what it means to discover and be yourself in all its joyous possibilities and painful limitations. Attending the Nashville premier, which featured a special appearance and Q&A session by hometown hero Korine, was an added bonus.

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More Tom Orange here.

Attention Span – Joshua Clover

Giovanni Arrighi | Adam Smith in Beijing | Verso | 2008

As a view of the future, with at least a partial hope that the next global regime might be less exploitation-based, it seems strangely optimistic. As a description of the now, and of the relation between interstate and intercapitalist developments, it’s clear-minded and ambitious. As an account of the jagged decline of the United States as global hegemon, it’s a blitz.

Kevin Davies | The Golden Age of Paraphernalia | Edge | 2008
M.I.A. | Kala | Interscope | 2007

The benefit of Edge being a little shambling in their publication schedule is that I have gotten to put some version of this book on the Attention Span list for eleven consecutive years. For all the magnificent of the parts (with Lateral Argument still magnificentest), the book is the thing: an overlapping structure which asks you ceaselessly to reevaluate the scale of parts and wholes, to read every passage as an ambiguous instance shifting within a structure within a circuit. In this sense it’s a triumph of thinking globalization/late capitalism/the lives within it, comparable only to the markedly different Kala, M.I.A.’s album which nonetheless takes up very much the same problem, about the representability of part and whole in the world-system. Or: it’s basically the soundtrack for Mike Davis’s World of Slums. In making a mystified situation experienceable —in this case the circuits of economy, terror, epidemic, and culture that form what we call globalization—it stands with any work of art this millennium.

David Harvey | graduate seminar podcast on Marx’s Capital | davidharvey.org | 2008

Also available from iTunes. So I guess this is pop culture.  It feels that way, which is nice.

Bhanu Khapil | Incubation: A Space for Monsters | Leon Works | 2006

A reminder—lifesaving—that even the problem sets that don’t compel you (I mean me, in this case) might compel someone else toward something fantastic and surprising and compelling, so might be truly useful.

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine | Metropolitan Books | 2007

A hybrid of a book: history, journalism, theory. These are coordinated to secure the claim that the structural similarities of torture strategies and Chicago School restructuring policies are neither incidental nor abstract. It’s the political economy, stupid.

Donald MacKenzie | various essays | current

Researcher at University of Edinburgh, he works on “the sociology of financial markets,” which means among other things that he’s pretty good at explaining “the new economy” to people like myself without much aptitude. Many of his papers are available from his faculty website, above.

Chris Nealon | Plummet | unpublished manuscript | 2008

It pains me to say it but no, I don’t think modern dance redeemed the industrial landscape

—unless you count that last audition scene in Flashdance

Ecstasy instead of classicism: every generation feeling it

Classicism: build your buildings so that even conquering hordes will be like, No way

Mark Ovenden | Transit Maps of the World | Penguin | 2007

A good introduction to some basic problems in system mapping, from the confrontation between topographic and diagrammatic to the placement of names. Also a good occasion to smoke pot and wonder what might cause some cities to have by far the coolest transit maps: Montreal, Rio, St. Petersburg. The 1977 Moscow map is one of the most striking graphicalizations ever. The book thinks it’s “Like knitting needles spearing a ball of yarn.” I think it’s a primitive picture of overdetermination.

George Stanley | Vancouver | New Star | 2008

…knowing
it’s this time, no other, this transparent
collision of times, of times flowing through each other,

times with their inside stories (p.120)

Stephanie Young | Picture Palace | in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni | 2008

when is speech that          and not just in a bubble
when art thou?                 acted upon

by another’s       resolution
and where?

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More Joshua Clover here.

Attention Span – Rae Armantrout

Ben Lerner | Angle of Yaw | Copper Canyon | 2006

This book isn’t new, but it’s new to me. I think Ben Lerner is brilliant.

Katie Degentesh | The Anger Scale | Combo | 2006

Like Ben Lerner, Katie Degentesh is new to me (I guess I’m a little slow) and really exciting. This is my favorite flarf.

Joseph Massey | Out of Light | Private | 2008

Joseph Massey is a relatively new arrival, but his minimalist, Zen-like poems seem like old friends.

Ron Silliman | The Age of Huts (compleat) | California | 2007

Ron Silliman is, of course, an old friend. It’s terrific to have his seminal early work back in print.

Fanny Howe | The Lyrics | Graywolf | 2007

As always, Fanny Howe blends the personal and the political into poems that sing.

Juliana Spahr | The Transformation | Atelos | 2007

Spahr’s poetic memoir blends the personal and the political in a different way.

Naomi Klein | The Shock Doctrine | Metropolitan | 2007

This is a clear, scathing history of the depredations of the Neocons.

Graham Foust | Necessary Stranger | Flood | 2007

I’ve been a Foust fan for awhile. His spare, skewed version of the lyric appeals to me.

Joseph Lease | Broken World | Coffeehouse | 2007

This is the first Joseph Lease book I’ve read. He’s got a funny way with desperation and anger that I appreciate.